there and help her." At that
instant she succeeded in getting the baby adjusted, and to my
horror took up a bundle from the grass and disclosed a second baby!
Then _I_ went down. I learned that she had just come from the
poorhouse, where she had spent six weeks, and before going further
had laid her two three-weeks-old boys on the cold, wet grass, while
she washed out their clothes in the stream. The clothing was the
merest rags, all scrambled up in a damp bundle. She had heard her
old mother was ill in Milltown and had "fretted" about her till she
could bear it no longer, so had started to walk ten miles to her. I
hailed a boy with a jaunting-car--told her to wait and I would take
her home--got my luncheon--fed the boy's horse, bought lunch for
boy and woman--and off we went, she sitting on one side of the car
with her two babies, wet bundle, two milk bottles and rubber
appendages, bare feet and flying hair, and I on the other, with the
boy in front.

For a long way both babies cried; they were blue as pigeons, and
had on nothing but little calico slips, no socks even. She had four
children older than these--a husband who went to fairs selling
papers and anything he could to support them all--and an aged
father and mother who lived with them. She said if God had given
her only one child, she could still help earn something to live on,
but now He had given her two, she couldn't. When we reached
Milltown I followed her home. It was in a long row of one-room
things with a door--but no window. Some peat was smouldering under
a hole in the roof called a chimney, and the place was thick with
smoke. On the floor in one corner was some straw with a blanket on
it, which she said was her bed; in another were some boards
fastened into bed-shape, with straw packed in, and this belonged to
her father and mother. Where the four other children, with the
chickens and the pig, found their places to sleep, I couldn't see.
I went to the home of another tenant, and there again was one room,
and sitting around a pile of smoking-hot potatoes on the cold, wet
ground--not a board or even a flag-stone for a floor--were six
ragged, dirty children. Not a knife, fork, spoon or platter was to
be seen. The man was out working for a farmer, his wife said, and
the evidences